Thinking Worlds

Having been ridden out of Second Life on a rail for asocial networking (convicted introversion) and having failed miserably to furnish my Google Lively world either with avatar (straight from the Next dummy line) or paraphenalia (ersatz-IKEA), I have tended to avoid virtual worlds. Unless of course they have decent draught beer & a sociable clientele.

Then suddenly a double whammy. The JISC RSCs in Scotland are hosting a Virtual Worlds 2008 conference / seminar at the University of Stirling on October 29th & the September / October 2008 issue of Educause Review is virtually (sorry) awash with the (real) uses of virtual worlds in (US) Higher Education.

And then I discovered Thinking Worlds. Thinking Worlds is a learning educational game authoring engine which is effectively Open Source or at least is free for non-commercial use. Which I suppose (and this is stretching a point in this fiscally-driven FE world) means us. And very good it looks too.

The package consists of the Thinking Worlds player & an authoring program. There are also a lot of existing add-ons (learning modules) & assets (basically some off-the-shelf worlds that can be used to build your own add-ons). There's certainly enough documentation in terms of pages but then we don't read manuals, do we? Can be installed on a server (aye, right; we canna have that) or locally if you have local admin privileges.

There is probably a lot of work involved in developing any learning package although I suppose that the Medieval add-on, say, might be customised (and they can be) to resemble the mental if not the physical aspects of FE librarianship. A jest...

Certainly worth a deal of further investigation. Persuade an HN Games Programming student that this represents a worthwhile college project.
One gripe. Both the documentation and the online help suggest that there is a Thinking Worlds community. This would obviously be very useful but I sure can't find it.

Dammit, they've probably set one up in Second Life...

http://www.thinkingworlds.com/

OpenSim? Methinks not!